Is Amazon the Next Social Media Giant?

It was only a matter of time until e-commerce giant Amazon joined the social media world. While not a true social media platform just yet, Amazon has added a shoppable posts feature to their offering simply named Amazon Posts.

Here is what you need to know…

1. Posts is currently in beta, but Posts is a FREE new way to help drive brand and product discovery and consideration with curated lifestyle imagery in a shoppable feed on the Amazon app and while using Amazon on a mobile device.

2. Currently only available in the US

3. Only available to sellers who are registered in Amazon Brand Registry

4. Do not need a separate advertising budget to Post

5. It’s measurable! You can review metrics for viewable impressions, engagement, and engagement rates for each of your Posts

If you already have an existing social media strategy, adding Amazon Posts into the mix is seamless! Contact me to get started.

The Ultimate Ecommerce Checklist

While the popular saying, “never judge a book by its cover” may be true for many things, it may not be true for websites. According to Blue Corona, 48% of people use website design as a deciding factor when determining the business’s creditability.

Whether you are new to the ecommerce world or looking to improve your existing site, these five tips will come in handy.

1. Ensure your website is user-friendly and responsive for mobile devices - overly cluttered navigation bars, poor call to actions, and busy homepages distract from closing the sale. Add in a disproportionate view on a cell phone or tablet and you have a lose-lose combination.

2. Make sure the checkout progress is secure - giving customers peace of mind is key. Having an SSL certificate is 100% necessary. Add additional messaging at checkout notifying shoppers that their information is protected and encrypted.

3. Curate descriptive product summaries while keeping SEO in mind - educating your customers on the product you are selling is a MUST, however, there is nothing worse than investing in copy to have no one read it. Keep your descriptions fun and true to your brand.

4. Integrate social media sharing on products - let your customers help you get the word out! This will broaden your audience to their friends and family. Isn’t word-of-mouth advertising the best?

5. Include a seamless site-search with faceted filters - many consumers already know what they are looking for. Faceted filters can include product type, colors, size, price range, etc.

Need help building an ecommerce website or looking to polish up an existing one? Let’s get started!

Increase Sales with Amazon Advertising

In a recent blog post, we covered wanting a piece of the ecommerce pie and now with mass closures to non-essential businesses, the need to get your business in front of consumers has never been more important.

Amazon advertising has been a successful and cost-effective solution for several of my clients and the options are virtually endless!

Here’s how they work…

Sponsored campaigns on Amazon allow your brand or product to be featured in key areas of Amazon.com. The campaigns include images of your product, product name, their star rating, and the coveted Prime logo (if applicable). Simply having your ad show up doesn’t cost you money until the ad is clicked on. You pay for each click, commonly referred to as your cost per click.

The average cost per click (CPC) for Amazon advertising is $0.97 according to Ad Badger. This is pretty similar, if not less, than Google advertising. The benefit to using Amazon advertising for your products is that the shopper is “ready to buy”, whereas many users refer to Google for their pre-buying research.

To get started you’ll need:

1. A budget - daily spend or spend amount for the entire lifetime of the campaign

2. Campaign Type - sponsored products, sponsored brand, display ads etc. We can work together to ensure you are getting your product and brand in front of the right audience.

3. Keywords - targeted keywords to verify you are getting relevant clicks: broad match, phrase match and exact match. This is a vital step otherwise you are literally throwing money away. Optimizing keywords as the campaign progresses is also an important step. Never. Stop. Optimizing.

What you’ll get from me once the above is implemented:

1. REPORTING! Learning about what worked and what didn’t is crucial to ensuring your dollars are working hard for you. Reporting in real-time allows for nearly instant adjustments, pausing of lackluster campaigns and making tweaks to ensure your advertising cost of sale (ACOS) is as low as it can possibly be.

Ready to advertise on Amazon? Let’s get started.

Getting Customers to Commit with Abandon Cart Emails

Don’t we all wish our customers were like penguins? Falling in love and committing to our products and services, never leaving us. I know I’d love for each one of you reading this blog to fall in love with my services and choose me as your lifelong marketing guru, but I digress….

Getting your customers to commit to your products once they’ve found your website, researched products, and added it to their cart can be easier with the right follow up.

I dare to speak for all of us when I say, we’ve all added more to our shopping cart than we intend to buy. Our wish list of things that at the moment would make us so happy, but maybe not our wallets. We often leave the cart without buying a single thing. Enter abandoned cart emails.

Abandoned cart emails are sent to customers who ALMOST made a purchase in hopes to encourage them to complete their transaction. Can you believe only 19% of even the top 1,000 ecommerce websites have any kind of abandonment recovery? Half of frequent cart abandoners will purchase when hit with remarketing.

Does your website have remarketing abandoned cart emails set up? Let’s get your customers back.

Social + Ecommerce = Shoppable Posts

What do you get when you put two of my favorite things together? Social Media + Ecommerce = Shoppable Posts.

Selling on Instagram is getting a lot easier with the launch of their latest shoppable posts feature! Back in the day, okay maybe just last year, the only way to get Instagrammers to buy was to hope they went back to the link in your bio AND THEN found the actual product you were mentioning AND THEN added it to their cart. Another option for those with a larger following was the swipe up feature in Instagram stories (which BTW requires a minimum of 10K followers).

This new shoppable feature is making checking out a breeze - users don’t even have to leave the Instagram app!

Have you used it yet? Not sure where to start? I’m only a phone call, tweet, or email away. Let’s make it happen!